Gothic Sculpture 1140 1300

This study examines the development of Gothic sculpture throughout Europe. It discusses the most famous monuments, such as the cathedrals of Chartres, Amiens and Reims, Westminster Abbey and the Siena Duomo, and less familiar buildings in France, England, Italy, Germany, Spain and Scandinavia.

An anthology offering a chronological assessment of a whole range of technical documents on art written by and for clerks, laymen, churchmen, lawyers, city magistrates, and guilds, this text reveals differences in milieu, customs , resources and psychology during different periods. First Published in 1971 by Prentice Hall.

The thirteenth-century Jewish mystical classic Sefer ha-Zohar (The Book of Splendor), commonly known as the Zohar, took shape against a backdrop of rising anti-Judaism in Spain. Mystical Resistance reveals that in addition to the Zohar's role as a theological masterpiece, its kabbalistic teachings offer passionate and knowledgeable critiques of Christian majority culture. During the Zohar's development, Christian friars implemented new missionizing strategies, forced Jewish attendance at religious disputations, and seized and censored Jewish books. In response, the kabbalists who composed the Zohar crafted strategically subversive narratives aimed at diminishing Christian authority. Hidden between the lines of its fascinating stories, the Zohar makes daring assertions that challenge themes important to medieval Christianity, including Christ's Passion and ascension, the mendicant friars' new missionizing strategies, and Gothic art's claims of Christian dominion. These assertions rely on an intimate and complex knowledge of Christianity gleaned from rabbinic sources, polemic literature, public Church art, and encounters between Christians and Jews. Much of the kabbalists' subversive discourse reflects language employed by writers under oppressive political regimes, treading a delicate line between public and private, power and powerlessness, subservience and defiance. By placing the Zohar in its thirteenth-century context, Haskell opens this text as a rich and fruitful source of Jewish cultural testimony produced at the epicenter of sweeping changes in the relationship between medieval Western Europe's Christian majority and its Jewish minority.

Richly illustrated, Early Gothic Column-Figure Sculpture in France is a comprehensive investigation of church portal sculpture installed between the 1130s and the 1170s. At more than twenty great churches, beginning at the Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis and extending around Paris from Provins in the east, south to Bourges and Dijon, and west to Chartres and Angers, larger than life-size statues of human figures were arranged along portal jambs, many carved as if wearing the dress of the highest ranks of French society. This study takes a close look at twelfth-century human figure sculpture, describing represented clothing, defining the language of textiles and dress that would have been legible in the twelfth-century, and investigating rationale and significance. The concepts conveyed through these extraordinary visual documents and the possible motivations of the patrons of portal programs with column-figures are examined through contemporaneous historical, textual, and visual evidence in various media. Appendices include analysis of sculpture production, and the transportation and fabrication in limestone from Paris. Janet Snyder's new study considers how patrons used sculpture to express and shape perceived reality, employing images of textiles and clothing that had political, economic, and social significances.

The Gothic is a contested and complicated phenomenon, extending over many centuries and across all the arts. In The Edinburgh Companion to the Gothic and the Arts, the range of essays run from medieval architecture and design to contemporary gaming and internet fiction; from classical painting to the modern novel; from ballet and dance to contemporary Goth music. The contributors include many of the best-known critics of the Gothic (e.g., Hogle, Punter, Spooner, Bruhm) as well as newer names such as Kirk and Round. The editor has put all these contributors in touch with each other in the preparation of their essays in order to ensure the maximum benefit to the reader by producing a well-integrated book which will prove much more than a collection of disparate essays, but rather a distinctive contribution to a field.

This collection of articles devoted to Europe was born from the urgent need to present the specificity of European culture, both its unity and diversity, and at the same time create a stimulating dialogue about European culture and its complexities. European culture, considered as all inherited beliefs and values behind social action, has been treated in the past as a complex phenomenon of superior value, as the result of a common past among European nations, the permeation of various cultural elements between cultures, and their absorption in different contexts. In the past the process of shaping European identity was often fierce and dramatic, influenced by the events taking place within, but also outside European borders. Now, it has undergone various transformations as a result of new political, economic and cultural challenges. For this reason, the authors and editors of this volume place emphasis on diachronic perspectives: their approaches often consider local European issues against a global background.

Demonstrating the influence of optical science on medieval relief sculpture, this groundbreaking book reveals that the concepts that informed the codification of perspective by Renaissance painters were already being employed by sculptors centuries earlier.